But first, let's go off on a tangent.

I remember watching my dad eat a plate of sausages at a restaurant once. German, Austrian, Polish sausages, lined neatly on a plate. He ate them with so much gusto. You could see the tail-end of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth as he chewed. But I hated those sausages. I never used to eat sausages. Intestines filled with meat did not at all sound appealing to me.

Until now. Now it is as if I'm drawn to them. Italian sausages with rice, Polish Kielbasas with pasta. The ubiquitous street frankfurter. So many miles away from home and him, so many years away from that memory. Isn't it strange how one can feel more connected to a moment once time and space have contrived to bring you and that moment apart?

***
Turn away. This is blasphemy.
This post will get me hanged.
From a journal entry some time ago

How can I create a seamless belief system with two opposing cores? There is an ocean between "me" and "them". What does it matter if the ocean is me?

For the true believer, everything is an enrichment of faith. For the cynic, everything is a gap, another loophole begging to be questioned. I was fourteen when I recognized the desperation of wanting to believe, but never gaining the necessary conviction.

My so-called faith is the by-product of a previous life dedicated to walking the path of least resistance. It was much easier to say "pray for me" than not to say anything at all, to believe no matter how half-heartedly, than to feel utterly hopeless and helpless. It was much easier to think that there is someone to beg, to cajole, to bargain with, that I had access to a higher being who controlled everything I could not.

And it was easier to nod yes, than to take a stand. It was easier to let other people wallow in their comfortable bubbles, easier not to ask the questions they don't want to hear in the first place. Besides, I never liked explaining myself. I don't like feeling that I have to.

And for a time, it seemed almost magical. We had intense spiritual retreats that had hardened teen-agers bawling like babies. We felt benevolent with our forgiveness. We felt selfless, saintly. In truth we were so entrenched in doctrine that we became intoxicated by the rituals.

In truth, this so-called faith is a mishmash of beliefs culled from many other religious traditions. I am not even speaking of Christ and whether or not he was real. (That is a whole other jounral entry altogether.) I am merely talking about the men who built the Church decades after his death. After all, the first fathers did not create this religion in a vaccuum. They were human too. And with their humanity comes the traces of Egyptian mythology, druidism, Greco-Roman doctrine, etc.

Do you remember Antioch, the Council of Nicaea, the dead sea scrolls? Upon whose authority does the new testament rest? Our collection of gospels, our set of doctrines, were decided upon by a congregation of men gathered by an ambitious pagan Emperor (Constantinople) whose deathbed conversion is controversial at best.

I don't pretend to know what the truth is. God never wrote anything down. Even Jesus never wrote anything down. All we have are these suppositions of men. Suppositions and decrees that we all know can be overturned. Galileo is but one who has proven the church wrong (and made her look like an ignorant child to boot). The Vatican itself has had to re-think not a few of the assertions it made in less enlightened times. We have proven the fallacies of popes and yet we still call them infallible.

These are not radical new findings by some atheistic archeologist/historian. These are facts -lessons, if you will - gathered from my notes in Religion and Theology classes that were taught by devout and intelligent priests and nuns. This is the undisputed history of our faith.

Our faith. With its history of bloodshed, subordination, tyranny, and self-service. Still, I do recognize that this faith born of blood and chaos is not entirely a bad one. I recognize that this faith has love and peace at the core. I recognize the beauty in a faith that preaches salvation, equality, and tolerance. I recognize the importance of this faith to so many in this world.

And yet, as beautiful as this belief may now be, I must say that I am reluctant to blindly accept the words/decisions of a few men from centuries ago - men who were neither extraorindarily wise nor extraordinarily good, men who had their own biases, men who had their own faults, men who made their own mistakes. Simply put, mere mortals, just as I am.

I don't pretend to know the truth better than they do, but I don't subscribe to the notion that these same men automatically know truth better than I do either. Like most of my friends (products of a fine, fine insitution), I was taught to question everything, never to take anything at face value, to submit everything to the critique of my own mind. Everything, it seems, except this inherited set of dogma, where, by the power of its sanctity, every whispered answer never leads anywhere but back to dogma itself.

Dogma. I am reluctant to accept the apocryphal words of a few men as fundamental, existential truth.

After all, what makes the thoughts and words of these men, whose lives we know next to nothing about, greater than mine that I should follow them without question? Their age? The mystique surrounding them? The era in which they lived? Their deaths? That isn't enough.

Do I still believe in God? At night, sometimes, when I feel helpless and alone, I take out my repertoire of prayers. I can still lose myself in the words. I can still find comfort in the knowledge that so many others have found solace within the soft sanctuary of an Ave Maria.

But I'm no longer sure that these words are directed to anyone other than myself and the space around me. I'm not sure that I'm praying to anyone or anything anymore.

***

I've grown away from this argument since I wrote it. I just put it here it to remind myself of the kind of person I used to be.

After deciding to post this little excerpt from an old diary, I came across this quote in someone's blog, a quote I heard often enough in my childhood: "If you believe and it turns out He doesn't exist, you lose nothing. But if you don't believe and it turns out He does exist, you lose everything".

To that, I can only offer a quote from another mere mortal (my beloved Douglas Adams): "If God is the kind of god who is impressed by that kind of hairsplitting, then I'm not impressed by him."